Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Thus on the day of the massacre Washington returned to Great Meadows and carefully composed his diary account. The next day, May 29, he wrote his official letters to describe the incident in ways just technically shy of falsehood and sent the prisoners (or, as he said, spies) under guard to Dinwiddie, along with an urgent request for more supplies and reinforcements. Concerned that a French and Indian attack would ensue, he also began pushing his men to finish the fortifications. By June 2 their small circular palisade, aptly named Fort Necessity, was complete, and Washington had prayers read within its walls.15

  Prayer was certainly in order. Consisting only of a seven-foot-high circular stockade of split logs enclosing a shelter for storing ammunition and supplies, Fort Necessity was about fifty feet in diameter and thus big enough to hold only sixty or seventy men. Trenches had to be dug around its perimeter to shelter the rest of its defenders in case of an attack. Moreover, the situation of the fort and its entrenchments on the valley floor, overlooked by hills, made the position dangerously vulnerable to enfilading fire. So poorly sited and so dubiously constructed was this fort that only an amateur or a fool would have thought it defensible; the Half King, who was neither, tried to explain the ways in which “that little thing upon the Meadow” could prove a death trap. Washington, unfazed, brushed off the criticism in full confidence that the fort could withstand “the attack of 500 men.” The facts that he had never before built a fort or come under attack by any number of men at all did not shake his opinion.16

  Washington’s behavior over the next month suggests that it was not merely foolish self-confidence that made him unwilling to invest more than minimal effort and time in the construction of Fort Necessity. Rather, it would seem, he neglected to take adequate defensive measures because he had no intention of making a stand at Great Meadows. He intended instead to advance and carry the campaign to the gates of Fort Duquesne itself.

  Given what Washington knew about the French strength at the Forks—next to nothing—and what he thought was happening back beyond the mountains—that an intercolonial effort to supply and reinforce him was under way—his intention to take the offensive may not have been quite as deranged as it looks in retrospect. During the second week of June two hundred more troops arrived from Virginia, bringing with them nine swivel guns (small cannon capable of firing a two-pound projectile). Three days later one of the South Carolina independent companies marched in, adding about a hundred British regulars and forty beef cattle to the expedition’s effective strength. Washington had also been getting assurances from George Croghan, whom Dinwiddie had appointed as a supply contractor and who was with the army at Fort Necessity, that a great pack train would deliver fifty thousand pounds of flour by the middle of June. He had hopes of using Tanaghrisson and Croghan as intermediaries to attract Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos to the cause of expelling the French. How could he know, in the middle of June when he had four hundred men on hand and when things looked as if they would continue improving, that he had already received his last reinforcements, that no further supplies would ever arrive, and that the Ohio Indians had no intention of acting against the French?

  A more cautious commander might have expected the worst and planned for it, but Washington was too inexperienced to see prudence as a virtue. On June 16, leaving the independent company to garrison Fort Necessity (Captain James Mackay, commissioned by the king, refused to place himself under command of a lieutenant colonel commissioned by the governor of Virginia), Washington marched his three hundred Virginians down the trail toward Gist’s settlement, Red Stone Fort—and Fort Duquesne.17

  Over the next two weeks, as his men and horses struggled to move their baggage, supply wagons, and the nine heavy swivel guns over unimaginably bad trails, Washington began to learn the value of planning for the worst. Wagons broke down constantly, and horses died at an appalling rate. Every wagon abandoned and every horse destroyed meant that more of the army’s baggage and artillery had to be hauled by the men themselves. Each mile the column traveled became a slower, more exhausting mile than the last. When the expedition reached Gist’s settlement, Washington, Croghan, and Tanaghrisson met for three days with Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo representatives and tried to convince them to join the expedition against the French. They would have nothing to do with the plan.18

  Tanaghrisson now knew that the situation was hopeless, for the refusal of the Indians who remained on the Ohio to follow his lead was clearly hardening into something much more like a willingness to take up the hatchet on behalf of the French. He could easily understand why. For the Ohio Indians to join the English would require them to abandon the valley and move their families, for safety’s sake, to the white settlements of Pennsylvania or Virginia, where they would live as refugees as long as the war lasted. Meanwhile their young men would risk their lives as warriors in the service of a government that had never yet shown itself to be a reliable ally, cooperating with a force commanded by a man who had yet to show himself to be competent; and for what? To enable the English to secure control of the Ohio Country, into which their settlers and their animals would move, like so many locusts, as soon as the French had been expelled. It was clear to Tanaghrisson that his position was now hopeless, and nothing could be gained by remaining with Washington’s force. When the conference broke up he quietly returned to Great Meadows, gathered his family and all but a few of his followers, and left for Aughwick (now Shirleysburg, Pennsylvania), George Croghan’s frontier trading post. There he would die, on October 4, the victim of a disease that his followers suspected was witchcraft. Before he died he would be heard to say that Washington was “a good-natured man, but had no Experience,” and that despite his utter lack of familiarity with woodland warfare and with Indians, he was “always driving them on to fight by his Directions.” 19 Who in his right mind would fight for such a man?

  Washington regretted Tanaghrisson’s departure and sent a messenger to try to persuade him to return; but he had never been convinced that Indians could make a decisive difference in European-style military operations and therefore did not depart from his earlier plans to press on toward the French. If he would not be able to count on the Indians to help him attack Fort Duquesne, he could still advance to Red Stone Creek, build fortifications around the Ohio Company blockhouse, and await the reinforcements that he knew were on the way. Thus, despite dwindling food supplies and the steady loss of horses and wagons, he drove his men on, by sheer force of will, to improve the road from Gist’s settlement to Red Stone. His resolve held until June 28, when Indian informants brought word that a powerful French force had left Fort Duquesne with the intention of driving the Virginians back beyond the mountains. After pausing for a day to consider making a stand at Gist’s settlement, Washington and his officers decided to retreat.20

  It was a wiser decision than Washington knew, for he and his men were in no condition to meet the force that was advancing from the Forks. Soon after word of Jumonville’s defeat and death reached Contrecoeur, his garrison had received a great reinforcement of more than a thousand men from Canada. Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, Ensign Jumonville’s older brother, commanded this detachment and begged Contrecoeur to allow him to lead an expedition to punish Washington and his men. Contrecoeur had already begun to outfit a force of six hundred French regulars and Canadian militiamen, together with about a hundred Indian allies, and he readily agreed. Thus when Coulon de Villiers set out from Fort Duquesne in late June, he was at the head of the most formidable military force for a thousand miles in any direction. Traveling light, they quickly ascended the Monongahela Valley toward the Virginians.

  Meanwhile Washington’s retreat had become a nightmare. So many draft animals died that the men themselves were forced to drag or push wagon loads of supplies and cannon a distance of about twenty miles in two days’ time. When the force reached Fort Necessity on Tuesday, July 1, further retreat would have been out of the question, even if anyone had proposed it. The men were too
exhausted to continue, and reports from Indian scouts suggested that the French were not far behind them. Washington’s Virginians and the independent company therefore did what they could to improve their defenses and waited for the attack.21

  On Wednesday night it began to rain. The luckiest of the men slept, if they slept at all, in leaky tents. Most lacked shelter of any sort. Long before dawn the valley floor had become a bog and pools of water lay deepening in the trenches that flanked the fort. At roll call on Thursday morning, only three hundred of the four hundred men at Fort Necessity were fit for duty.22

  The French attack came at about eleven o’clock. Washington seems initially to have thought that his adversary would fight in the open, and he marched his men out to give battle on the meadow. Coulon de Villiers, a veteran of the previous war and able to spot the terrain that would give him the greatest tactical advantage, preferred to disperse his men along the forested hillsides that overlooked the fort. Realizing his mistake as the French force began to rake his formations with musketry, Washington ordered his men back to the stockade and its outworks. There they stayed, for eight hellish hours, while their enemies fired down into shallow trenches that offered little cover from musket balls and none at all from the rain. Sheltered under trees, at ranges as close to the British lines as sixty yards, the attackers had every advantage, including the ability to keep their muskets dry enough to fire. Since their firing mechanisms were not watertight, the English muskets exposed to the rain rapidly became useless; they could be restored to service only by the tedious process of extracting their balls and powder charges, then cleaning and drying their barrels and locks before reloading. Since the Virginians and the independents between them had “only a Couple of Screws”—the implements needed to extract the useless charges—by midafternoon almost none of their muskets still functioned. Trapped in trenches only two or three feet deep and half-full of water, exposed to relentless musket fire and unable to shoot back at the enemy even when they could see them clearly, the defenders of Fort Necessity made a compact, helpless target. By the time darkness fell, a third of them were either dead or wounded.

  As the light faded, discipline disintegrated—unsurprisingly, since the troops, who had already endured enormous stress, now had every reason to think that the French and Indians would soon be slaughtering them like hogs—and men broke into the fort’s rum supply. “It was no sooner dark,” wrote one of Washington’s company commanders, Captain Adam Stephen, “than one-half of our Men got drunk.”23 Washington must have known that even if the rain stopped, his men would be unable to defend themselves against another attack. His first battle had ended in massacre when he had been unable to protect the French from Tanaghrisson and his warriors. Now, with his own men out of control, it looked as if his second battle would end in a massacre of another sort.

  Then, at eight o’clock, as the firing from the French lines tapered off in the gloom of dusk and rain, relief came from an unexpected quarter. A voice called out from the tree line inviting the English to negotiate; Captain de Villiers was offering safe conduct to any officer who wished to discuss terms. Washington hesitated—was it a ruse?—then sent his old companion and interpreter Jacob Van Braam off to meet with the French. Captain Van Braam, who had been commanding a Virginia company, realized how very poor the chances of extricating the English troops were. He was therefore probably even more surprised than relieved to learn that Coulon de Villiers was offering a chance to withdraw from the field of battle with honor. He had come, the French commander explained, to avenge the death of his brother and his brother’s men. That he had done. If the English were now prepared to sign articles of capitulation, to withdraw from the Ohio Country and pledge not to return within the space of a year, to repatriate the prisoners they had taken, and to leave two officers as hostages at Fort Duquesne to guarantee the fulfillment of the surrender terms, he would allow them to march off the next day carrying their personal possessions, their arms, and their colors. But if the English did not agree to these terms, Coulon assured the Dutchman, he would destroy them.

  Van Braam returned to the stockade with an account of the French offer and a rain-soaked copy of the capitulation terms for Washington to sign. He evidently did not understand, or at least did not say, that the nearly illegible document fixed responsibility on Washington for the “assassination” of Ensign Jumonville. No one within the stockade realized what Washington was admitting when he signed the terms, or understood how great the value of the admission could be to the French if a war should ensue. Nor did Washington, or anyone within his command, have any idea why the French were prepared to offer the terms they did. No one knew that the attackers were low on provisions and almost out of ammunition; no one could have guessed that Coulon de Villiers both feared that the fort would soon be reinforced and doubted that he had any right to take prisoners of war in a time of peace.

  Inside the fort’s leaking storehouse, puzzling over a document they could not read by the light of a guttering candle, Washington and his officers knew only that they were being offered a way out, and they took it. Van Braam and another company commander, Robert Stobo, volunteered to remain with the French as hostages, and a few minutes before midnight Washington signed the instrument of surrender. At ten o’clock the next morning—July 4—the demoralized, exhausted, hungover survivors of the battle straggled out of Fort Necessity and prepared to drag themselves back to Wills Creek. Only then did they realize that the Indians who had taken part in the attack were not Ottawas or Wyandots, traditional allies of the French. With a shock, as one witness wrote, “what is most severe upon us” suddenly became clear: “they were all our own Indians, Shawnesses, Delawares and Mingos.”24

  The Anglo-American forces had lost thirty killed and seventy wounded (many severely) out of about three hundred combatants on July 3. The members of the French and Indian party had suffered only three deaths in addition to an indeterminate number of wounds, most of which were minor.25

  It was July 9 before Washington’s force had limped the fifty miles back to Wills Creek, carrying the worst of the wounded on makeshift litters. Washington made his first report of the defeat to Dinwiddie and requested that an additional surgeon be sent to help his regimental doctor perform amputations on the wounded men who could still be saved. His soldiers began deserting immediately and continued to do so, in groups as large as sixteen at a time, through the next two months. Those who remained, whether due to loyalty or mere lack of the physical capacity to desert, did not cease to suffer. “The chief part” of his men, Washington wrote on August 11, “are almost naked, and scarcely a man has either Shoes, Stockings or Hat.” It was no wonder that “they will desert whenever they have an opportunity. There is not a man that has a Blanket to secure him from cold or wet.”26

  Defeated in spirit no less than in the flesh, Washington’s Virginians were incapable of further action. The triumphant French, in contrast, paused only long enough to destroy Fort Necessity, then marched for the Forks. By July 6 they had burned down the last vestiges of English occupation in the Ohio Country, Christopher Gist’s trading post and Red Stone Fort. Coulon de Villiers and his men entered Fort Duquesne to volleys of musketry and cannon salutes, welcomed as heroes who had completed the task Céloron had begun five years before.

  The marquis de Duquesne, delighted to receive Contrecoeur’s report that the Ohio Valley was secure at last, ordered the garrisons of the Ohio forts to assume a strictly defensive posture, reduced their strength to a total of five hundred men, and directed that a subsidized trade be begun to insure that the Ohio Indians would not be drawn back into Britain’s commercial orbit. Confident that he had accomplished his mission, he wrote to the minister of marine, resigning his post as governor-general and asking that he be posted once again to the navy. In October, while he awaited the opportunity to return to France, he performed one of his final diplomatic duties, a task in which he probably took more than usual satisfaction. An Iroquois delegation had come fro
m Onondaga to mend relations with the French. Far from being dead, as Tanaghrisson had wished, Onontio had become the overlord of the Ohio Country. 27

  CHAPTER 6

  Escalation

  1754

  IN WILLIAMSBURG, the news of Washington’s defeat fell on Robert Dinwiddie like a thunderclap. Within a few days he had reported to the Southern secretary, the secretary at war, the president of the Board of Trade, and practically everyone else in authority at home; had written urgently to the governors of the neighboring provinces for aid; had ordered more troops to be raised and marched to Wills Creek; had begun urging Washington to reassume the offensive before the end of the summer; and had started laying plans for a campaign of his own to extract a twenty-thousand-pound military grant from the Burgesses in their August session. With a single exception, all these endeavors failed to produce results. The Burgesses dug in their heels and refused to appropriate funds without first receiving what was tantamount to an admission of defeat from Dinwiddie in the pistole fee dispute. Washington, of course, could do no more at Wills Creek than struggle to keep the remnants of his command from falling apart entirely. Without further money from the Burgesses no further troops could be raised. Substantive help was forthcoming from none of the neighboring provinces except North Carolina, which stipulated that the monies it appropriated could only be expended within the province (a proviso that suggests the legislature was less concerned with supporting Virginia than with enlarging North Carolina’s meager supply of paper money). By early September, Dinwiddie was so depressed by his failure to elicit any response to the French threat that he was contemplating resignation. He did not yet know that the reports he had sent to his masters in London were creating the galvanizing effect that all his other efforts failed to generate. 1